evan jones | Binky's Alternate Reality

I already told you in my previous post that I’d be updating you on the process of writing my new collaborative novel “Sara Beth and The Magic Nails” and I plan on making good of that promise.

Before any of my novels are written, I always start with character developments. My characters are key; since they’re the ones responsible on taking me in the journey of their lives. Remember in the first season of Heroes, how the painter Isaac would go on a “trance” and painted the future? Well, in a weird way, that’s how I write. It’s like I’m in a trance and the words just flow out because the characters become alive inside my head and they’d go off on their adventures and I’m just in the background, writing everything down.

I never know when I start how I’m going to end the novel, the characters decide it for me.

This is what I meant by “schizophrenic”.

In the new novel, there are five main characters, all women (because that’s one theme that inspired me lately, female friendships), all from different backgrounds, all share one common thread that will put them on a collision course with each other.

The first two women I’m going to introduce here are Cassandra “Casey” Goldstein and Evan Jones.

"What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies." - Aristotle

Cassandra “Casey” Goldstein and Evan Jones have been best friends since high school. They gravitated towards each other when they were both sent to detention in their freshman year, and had been inseparable ever since.

On the outside, it seems like they have nothing in common. Cassandra, who everyone calls Casey (except for Evan, who fondly calls her ‘Cassey’ instead), is a 5’9 blonde socialite who has designers like Marc Jacobs and Diane Von Furstenberg on her speed dial. The daughter of movie mogul David Goldstein and former 70s French supermodel Louise Mouret-Goldstein, for Casey, instant fame is her birthright. But unlike other New York trust fund princesses who frequently posed for the society pages of glossy magazines, Casey prefers to hide from the spotlight. She did some modeling while in high school, but only as an excuse to skip school. After walking down the runway for a brief period of time, she disappeared from the limelight when she escaped to Rhode Island to attend Brown University with her best friend, Evan. After graduating from Brown University with a degree in Art History, Casey relocated to Williamsburg, Brooklyn and worked in a small art gallery that eventually closed down three years later. She returned to Manhattan and purchased a loft in Greenwich Village where she became the neighbor of New York DJs, fashion models and Broadway actors.

The Inspiration For The Character Cassandra "Casey" Goldstein

Despite her aversion to the glitz and glamor of a socialite life, Casey did have a weakness for designer duds. She turned a spare bedroom into a closet to accommodate her expensive hobby. She was always on the front row of every show during New York Fashion Week, and her black Amex card was always pushed to the limit with her overspending. Her shopaholic tendencies did not escape the attention of her mogul father however, and after she burned a hole in her trust fund yet again with her outrageous purchases, he decided to freeze her account to teach her a lesson.

That was when notorious shopper Casey Goldstein found herself broke in Brooklyn, after attending a wild party thrown by one of her designer friends, and with only $50 in her wallet and a massive hangover, she stumbled into the small nail salon that Sara Beth happened to work in…

What happens next? Well, you have to wait for the novel to find out! ;p

Evan Jones, Casey’s best friend, had a very different story and a very different background. Evan is a petite brunette who wasn’t born in a wealthy family like Casey. Her father owns a bodega in Queens and her mother is a homemaker. She came from a very ordinary family and if it weren’t for her extraordinary brain, she probably would have lived an ordinary life. Casey had always had exceptional intelligence, she could read and write at the age of three, and she read the Iliad at the age of 10, when most little girls her age were still reading Anne of Green Gables. Her intelligence didn’t escape her parents, and they managed to get her a scholarship to attend the prestigious Manhattan private all-girls school, The Brearley School, where she met Casey Goldstein.

The Inspiration For The Character Evan Jones

Evan and Casey became such tight friends, that she chose to go to Brown University to be with Casey instead of going to Harvard, Yale or Princeton. After graduating from Brown, however, she and Casey lived in two different boroughs; Casey opted to move to Brooklyn to remain in obscurity, while she got a job in New York Magazine and lived in a small studio apartment in Mercer Street.

Despite her intelligence and working in a prestigious magazine, Evan always feels like a poser and outsider in the high-powered world of Manhattan social scene. She chose to be a loner, and was happy to be a wallflower in her office, and every event she had to attend. She was a shy recluse and she found comfort being a geek, she was very tech-savvy and had become quite an information junkie; so much so that Casey called her a “walking and breathing encyclopedia”. She had excellent knowledge of everything: from pop culture to politics to literature to useless information that most people don’t care about. But unlike Casey who always preferred to juggle men and not settle down so quickly, Evan had been in a relationship since college with an aspiring musician/DJ whom she was also living with.

A relationship with an aspiring musician/DJ meant spending a lot of lonely nights in the city, and Evan used them to ride the subway to different boroughs of New York, taking photographs. One night as she was taking pictures of some street musicians in Brooklyn, she was intrigued when she saw a heavily-tattooed man entered a small nail salon and proceeded to follow him in. That was when she discovered the late-night activity of the salon Sara Beth works in, and the quiet manicurist with a dark secret…

Want more? Keep tuning in and I’ll introduce you to the rest of the main characters in the next few days.

In the mean time, I’ll let you take a peek of the two best friends, Casey and Evan’s mood board.